Associated Press to launch Polygon-based photography NFT platform

Read the full article by Keira Wright here:

Associated Press will soon be featuring an NFT drop on it’s newly built NFT marketplace. The drop will consist of award-winning photographs of subjects in the likes of space, climate and war from AP’s very own photojournalists.

They will be released over several weeks starting on Jan. 31 for varying prices, according to the marketplace’s website.

The NFTs will be minted on the Polygon($Matic) Blockchain. The network best known for being the most popular layer-2 scaling solution on Ethereum.

The marketplace is being built by Xooa, a blockchain infrastructure platform specializing in building “white-label NFT marketplaces for brands and IP owners.”

Zach Danker-Feldman, head of marketplaces at Xooa, said the partnership will serve as a “powerful connection between the virtual world and the real world.”

Crypto wallet provider MetaMask is also supported, with future collaborations with Fortmatic, Binance and Coinbase on the cards. Additional upcoming features will include “withdrawals to other marketplaces,” “social media capabilities,” “new content concepts” and “off-chain benefits” for NFT holders.

In 2020, the AP used the Ethereum and EOS blockchains to publish the results of the presidential election. Furthermore, in 2018, it partnered with blockchain-based journalism startup Civil to facilitate its plans to track content usage and secure intellectual property rights.

The AP is not the only news organization showing interest in the potential uses of blockchain in the journalism industry. In June 2021, CNN launched its NFT project “Vault by CNN: Moments That Changed Us.” The collection tokenized a series of historic “news moments” from the news company’s 41-year history.